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Vermont Rural Energy Council (2006-2007)

The Vermont Rural Energy Council (VREC) was a 2-year project (2006-2007) developed by VCRD to provide a non-partisan analysis of opportunities in rural electric generation, fuel development and energy efficiency in Vermont.

VREC’s review of economic opportunities included three main inputs: from leaders in the field, from fact-based research on the status of this economic sector today, and from economic modeling of sector opportunities.

Through the course of its deliberations, VREC invited leaders in all aspects of energy generation, fuel development and efficiency to provide testimony and advice to the council. VCRD also commissioned the development of The Vermont Energy Digest to serve as a fact book for VREC’s deliberations, one that provided a common set of known data on renewable energy and efficiency in Vermont today. It is important to see the Digest as the companion to the VREC final report; in the broadest sense it provides a situation analysis on renewable energy generation, fuel development and efficiency in Vermont that can provide a baseline as we look to future opportunities.

VCRD commissioned Economic & Policy Resources of Vermont to build a model to evaluate the economic benefits of development in fourteen focused categories of efficiency, fuel development and electric generation. The economic model developed by this process is freely available for the administration, legislature and interested parties for further use in examining alternative scenarios or to evaluate a variety of diverse assumptions over time.

The findings from the analysis are significant and are outlined in the final report as are recommendations for future action that would advance rural energy generation, fuel development and efficiency in Vermont.